blog shutting down per Big Dog

look for more here in the ertswhile: https://www.reddit.com/r/hoboboobies/

A first rate song

This is the long awaited video to one of my favorite songs. Also you may note Aaron Rux in the video as it’s his song

the definitive list

So I’ve finally about wrapped up my Nerd de Force of science fiction.  My plan was to polish off as many Hugo Award winners as I could (I didn’t sidetrack from the list too much besides to delve into some Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and a few others) to try to get a fairly accurate representation on the best works of the genre. If you figure they’ve given the award every year since 1953, plus a couple retro awards, I’ve now tackled a quarter of them. While it’s not my most esteemed of accomplishments, I’m feeling good about the dent I’ve made. In any case, it’ll be nice to move on to something new for awhile and to ride the bus to work without a book with a spaceship on it’s cover.

Not that every book is about space. Some don’t have anything to do with space and a lot are set on Earth, although when this is the case it usually has to do with aliens on Earth. My favorite book was possibly Robert A. Heinlein’s “Stranger in an Strange Land”. A story who’s main character is the orphan of the first manned mission to Mars and grows up away from human contact, coming back to Earth to inherit his astronaut parent’s fortunes. This is my main draw to the genre. It’s away for us to think about who we are and why we are the way we are. The character comes to earth confused, unable to understand the idea of God or what constitutes our taboos, and fights the governments who are trying to take his assets. Obviously he proceeds to found a religion based on sleeping with people.  Heinlien pushed the science fiction genre into mainstream in the 60’s and this book’s cover calls it “the most famous science fiction novel ever written”, most likely because Billy Joel used it’s title in a line of “We Didn’t Start the Fire.” 

So far it is fairly similar to the book I just finished, 1975’s “The Dispossessed”. A story about a group of pilgrim anarchists who send one of their own to their capitalist/consumerist home world to reconnect. This is the basic tenet behind the genre. The idea of “what if”. What if we colonized another planet who set up new ways to live, what if we invented this, what if there were people like that… and it doesn’t necessarily have to be set in the future. There are a lot of sub-genre’s that people don’t think of as science fiction. For example there are a couple alternate history books on the list. Philip K. Dick’s (better known for the books behind the movie Blade Runner and A Scanner Darkly) “The Man in the High Castle” is about what would the world be like if the Axis had won WWII and we lived in a country split into an East Coast Nazi and West Coast Japanese empire.

Then of course there are the staple space opera’s of the genre. I read a coule books in series of Herbert’s Dune and Asimov’s Foundation. Dune was up there on my list of favorites. I only read the opener to this series, but at some point I will check out the other books. The world he set up in the first book is just too thick with characters and plot to not want to know what happened to the family of the Atreides and the Harkonnens and the struggle of the desert planet. Not making the list, but possibly my favorite series was Arthur C Clarke’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” series which goes on to 2010, 2061 and 3001, all awesome stories about what an alien intelligence could be like.

Then there are the dystopia novel’s of “Neuromancer” and “A Canticle for Leibowitz”, which are interesting for their different positions on where our society is going. Neuromancer being famous for being partially set in, and popularizing the word, ‘cyberspace’ before the idea of an electronic place was understood back in 1985.  “A Canticle for Leibowitz” takes the opposite spectrum being about a society that backlashed against technology after a nucular strike and destroyed all books to live a simpler, illiterate life. Similar to the idea of a backlash against technology is Stephenson’s book “Anathem”, robbed of the 2009 Hugo Award. The idea behind Anathem is what if a group of people tired of the perpetual media driven culture of the ‘now’ and the boom and busts of society, locked themselves away for centuries at a time shunning technology to study math and philosophy coming out every 100 or 1000 years to help soceity where they could.

For a sceptic such as myself there isn’t a much better place to find ideas about what could be if we weren’t stuck in our ways or if something were different.

my readings from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugo_Award_for_Best_Novel
1946 The Mule by Isaac Asimov
1954 Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
1960 Starship Troopers by Robert A. Heinlein
1961 A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller, Jr.
1962 Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein
1963 The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick
1966  Dune by Frank Herbert
1967 The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress by Robert A. Heinlein
1973 The Gods Themselves by Isaac Asimov
1974 Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke
1975 The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin
1985 Neuromancer by William Gibson
1986 Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card
1996 The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson
2002 American Gods by Neil Gaiman

Wow, I’ve been waiting to get that off my chest for awhile now. It’s amazing (for lack of a better word) what you can do when you cancel your cable, huh? Well anyone has any interesting non-fiction for me, let me in on it. It’s been far too long since I’ve read anything documenting real events and I’ve got a good list going here (Guns Germs Steel, A short history of nearly everything, Undaunted Courage, Godel Escher Bach, Surely you’re joking Mr Feynman) that I’m about to start working on.

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Danny DeVito’s last twitter message:

that feeling going into Atlantic O first beach day? slowly deeper & deeper. suddenly your balls/vagina hits! Opposite! BALL BLAZE NOW

Tweets by danny_devito

IASIP

carpe the sunday

burn

Book Review: The Elves of Cintra (Genesis of Shannara, Book 2)

 

This is an awesome middle book of a trilogy. Middle books are hard to read sometimes, because you know you will not reach any ultimate conclusion, and it isn’t as exciting as the first book where you are learning about the author’s world and characters. But this is more like GodFather II and leaving severed horse heads in your bed. Bad ass.

I thought this one was better than the first, and I am amped to read the 3rd, which I will buy on my way home today. If you have not read the Shannara series, get on board. Terry Brooks wrote the original like 30 years ago, and as I said, it is a standard LOTR plot. Then he continued that saga in a standard fantasy world with multiple more novels – all good.

He then did a prequil to the series, that is based in our world. That trilogy is supposed to be very good, but I haven’t read it.

This trilogy connects the other two worlds – our world, and the fantasy world. It is the story of how we got there, and it is awesome. I think what I like so much about it is that I thought it would be terrible. I bought the first book in the airport, and given that it is about the 17th Shannara series novel, my expectations were low.

Anyways, something about Knights of the Word, Demons, Elves, and a bunch of other shit battling it out in the Pacific Northwest when the world is on the brink of a haulocaust is pretty badass. Parker – the elves end up summiting Mount Raineer in this one, and have to do some ice climbing on their way up. I think they used your route – you should compare notes.

Honestly – I think you could easily read and enjoy this trilogy on its own without delving into the other series. But I would recommend just reading Sword of Shannara first, as it is a fantasy classic and you will enjoy it.

It might be kind of cool to start with the prequil though, then do this series, then do the Shannara stuff and see what it is like all in order.

Easiness to read = 9. Enjoyment = 8.

This is good shit, get on board.

www.riaaradar.com

I’m just throwing this out there to the blogoworld to get more people on board. Its from my phone at work so forgive the typos.

I was considering actually buying a new album for the 2nd time this year. Now normally I would download it instead, but there are 2 reasons why I will go buy it.

1) Mos Def, who I happen to like but haven’t exactly listened to a ton of his music, is selling his album, the ecstatic, as a t-shirt. For $40 you get a hipster t-shirt and a code that let’s you legally download his new album. That’s genius. I’ve seen people sell albums online in a variety of ways lately: usb sticks, art projects, I think someone sold a lamp, but a t-shirt just makes more sense. The only thing that I was sceptical about this was that some bigshot marketing exec came up with this plan to take my money… but

2) The label is in no way affiliated with the RIAA. You can go to website to http://www.riaaradar.com to verify, which I did after I heard about the website just yesterday. So really Mos Def’s label is just making smart inventive ways of getting their artists music out. For all I know this was Mos Def’s idea himself. Ill have to look into that.

http://www.lnaclothing.com/musictee/mosdef/

Trent Reznor is kicking himself for not thinking of this.

I’m also running for political office under the United States Pirate Party platform soon. Look for more about that.

The Great Gatsby

Once in awhile you hear whispers of something mentioned over and over until its more like a dull hum in the background and you can’t help but notice it. I think that’s what happened with Gatsby and all these great things he was apparently doing. I will say that Mr. Gatsby is pretty great. He’s a guy that you feel for and understand that he hasn’t done everything the right way, but you aren’t mad at him for it. Even if you do blame him for what’s gone wrong in his little rich neck of Long Island you are mostly proud or envious of him enough to not worry too much about it.

I will say the book does have some good characters and complicated love stories. There’s a kind of noir element to the subtle mafia sub-story and a few deaths thrown in there. There are a few men beatin on their women. But even describing it that way makes it sound much more exciting than it actually is. Basically Gatsby threw a bunch of really great parties in order to get the girl of his dreams. But he was in love with the dream, not the girl.

That’s pretty much all you need to know about the book. There are a bunch of soap opera happenings with the affluent neighborhood that he is in and there is a lot of American Dreaming going on in the head of our narrator and minor character, who is Mr Gatsby’s young neighbor. I’m not sure what to think of this book exactly. F Scott Fitzgeral was an American golden boy of sorts who set the work in a sort of utopian New York Suburb. I don’t mean utopian as in it was a perfect place, I mean it in the sense that it was possibly the best place on Earth. People credit the book for having beautifully described the “Jazz Age” of the US. It was a time before the depression, cars where just getting everywhere, it probably was a fantastical place compared to the rest of the world at the time, but it still seems kind of boring to me. I think everyone is in love with the fact that Fitzgerald wrote a good story and really nailed the American aspect of it. So Fitzgerald wrote the greatest book about America, the greatest place in the world – especially New York in the 20’s, therefore this book is the greatest book in the world. I guess you can’t argue with that logic.

Who am I to doubt a guy who spent the rest of his days palling around Europe with Hemingway. 10/10 greatest book ever.